Finding ways to talk to your toddler

You want to enrich your toddler's vocabulary. What do you talk to him about?

Parent advice

From our panel of staff contributors

We used to switch between "What's this?" (naming various objects) and "Where's this?" (searching for those same objects). Teaching a toddler the word "spatula" reminds you just how cool a word "spatula" really is.

Everything! Just get off the phone. Just talk. Just sing. Little children pick up sounds and become familiar with them. And they're terrific mimics. That funny face you make? They'll copy you. Same with sounds (as in words) when you point them out to them. Birds, dogs, colors, foods in the grocery store, whatever. You are feeding their bodies, of course, but also their brains with verbal input.

"I'm not talking flashcards," Walsh says. "I'm not talking vocabulary quizzes. I'm talking about the importance of conversation and the importance of reading to children and having that reading come alive when you editorialize and dramatize."

If you feel a little silly carrying on one-sided conversations, know that your toddler is communicating back to you, just not in a way you recognize.

"Children as young as 3 or 4 months are vocalizing their attempts to mimic what they're hearing," Walsh says. "The babbling of an American baby will be very, very different from the babbling of a Chinese baby because they're already attempting to mimic what they hear."

"If kids can decode words but they haven't got the warehouse of vocabulary so that all those decoded words make sense, they get frustrated and their brains disengage," Walsh says. "If I have a warehouse with a lot of vocabulary words and a lot of concepts already in it, as I decode the words I don't get lost. That's why language skills are not just the ability to decode and figure out how a word sounds, but more important, what the word means."

Ideally, Walsh says, this stocking process happens early. "What we want our kids to have is a very well-stocked warehouse of words and concepts and meanings so as they either hear or read those words they don't have to stop dead in their tracks," he says. "The window of opportunity to stock that warehouse is before kids even get to school.

"We don't stop stocking it once kids get to school, but we want them to have as rich a warehouse of information as possible when they get there."

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